Twitch Live Annotations for YouTube

Letting your audience know when you go live can be a lot of work. Chances are you maintain a presence on at least one social network, potentially two, if not three or four (we can keep counting … five, six, seven …). Our goal is to help you reach as many of these networks as quickly and easily as possible, each time you go live.

You can already manage your Twitch account so that your Twitch, Twitter, and Facebook followers are alerted when you begin a broadcast. Now, we’re excited to introduce a powerful new way to alert your audience: Twitch Live Annotations for YouTube.

Twitch Live Annotations enable a promotional alert that appears on all of your YouTube videos the instant you start broadcasting. These alerts are designed to direct people watching your videos on YouTube to your content as it happens on Twitch — keeping your current audience up to date and even bringing new viewers to your channel.

Details

For those of you that already have a YouTube account connected with your Twitch account, visit the Connections page in Settings and opt-in to Live Annotations. This may also be done when exporting any highlight using our YouTube exporter.

Once enabled, the Live Annotation appears every time you go live with no additional effort by you. If you ever choose to disable the annotation, you can do so from the same connections menu where they are enabled.

Live Annotations do not override any existing annotations or promotions you have on your YouTube videos. The Live Annotation appears next in line behind other scheduled promotions. Closing the active annotation, or letting it time out, allows your Twitch Live Annotation to appear.

tldr; Get it here. Oh, and we did a cool video, too. Read on! And now let’s commence with the...

holtzshedden

when & how long does it appear in the videos? does it effect existing annotations? what if you have multiple channels connected and two or more are live?

ClownShoe

Hey Holtzshedden,

The annotations are non-destructive and appear one after the other. At the current time they appear 5 seconds into your videos and have a 10 second duration.

jasonzm

^
Straight knowledge!

holtzshedden

hey, thanks for the answer. could you also answer if this effects existing annotations? I have a lot already in use and I am afraid I would screw them over.

ClownShoe

This is only for what YouTube calls InVideo Programming.

Our live annotations will never override your existing ones. They will simply queue up behind what you currently have and appear when there is room.

http://youtube.com/mabusgaming Mabusgaming

Holy crap, an awesome change! Love it!

kywildcat

pretty much confirms the Google buyout, congrats

Liz31

Someone is not aware of what happened last year in December on YouTube. YouTube is not Let’s Players friendly at all…

aynunimoose

You wrote that whole book of a reply because you don’t understand sarcasm.

LEOXD

Pretty much confirms that the rumors about the buyout are just that there is one feature where they worked together.

Ben Brocka

Fantastic news, this was the one feature Youtube’s streaming had that I really liked.

http://www.mobamonster.com Sugi

Now i only want to my Youtube Network Monetize by twitch ads.

GamerGuy09

Hopefully this is a good sign that Google Buying out twitch isn’t a bad thing because this a pretty neat feature that is actually useful for content creators.

Joseph Alminawi

If I enabled this feature, but don’t see any annotation on my existing videos – is there any debugging I can do?

Annie Berrones

Hey Joseph! Do you want to send me an email and I can ask our dev team to look into it a bit more?

http://www.soushibo.pl/ Sou Shibo

I got live, I got yt, setting is ON. How do I know it is working? I don’t see any annotation:/

http://www.thechrisd.com/ TheChrisD

It’s a step in the right direction in my view. Hopefully soon this will advance to simultaneous streaming on both sites (as a Twitch stream and as a YouTube live event) and automatic archival of full-length streams on YouTube (the way that YT does it for YT streams already).

It’s unfortunate that these Twitch annotations don’t override existing ones in the same vein that YouTube live events can. Is this something that can be worked on and changed, even if it’s a per-user option?

http://www.soushibo.pl/ Sou Shibo

Is is not working for me and other streamers that I know…

jcarnelluk

Dosent work for me at all, as soon as I stream it turns OFF featured video on YouTube and no twitch banner appears on the vids, tried this a few different ways and can confirm its bugged out at the moment. my channel youtube.com/theandroidizen anyway else had this bug?

Annie Berrones

Hey there, sorry to hear you’re running into some issues! Would you be able to send me an email (annie.berrones@twitch.tv) so we can look into this more?

http://rocketcheetah.com/ Chimpanzee

This is a great addition, but I wish you would also provide a simple way to get a channel’s status using JavaScript or PHP so broadcasters could display buttons on their website when they’re live.

There are hacky ways to do it but there should be an official method

Tarrant Rollins

There is an official method. Twitch has an API. Request `https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/streams/`. If `”stream” == null`, the channel is offline, if `”stream” != null` channel is online.

http://yes.I.have Killa

Seems like a nice feature, BUT its all trap to link your accounts with google..
inb4 we all will be forced to have g+ accounts to even chat here…
so no thank you, i love you twitch, but I will never link any google product directly with you

http://www.antdagamer.com *AntDaGamer* aka ADG

What if your have more than one channel in your Youtube Network. Is there a way to connect all of them?

http://www.pkgam.tumblr.com/ PkGam

This is nice and all, but I really hope it isn’t a sign that Google is buying you guys out because they will ruin Twitch like they have ruined every other thing they bought out.

Alisha12287

Fuck you google, seriously. If google as a company messes up twitch, they are going to have a LOT of angry streamers. gmail is fail, youtubes community is ruined because of the comment system (not to mention the layout and settings are bullshit to try and figure out or navigate easily), google wallet was a fail, why do they feel the need to buy everything and anything? It’s getting old, and the changes they make are usually not always positive, I can’t wait to stream without music.

StianNorway

dont work for me too.. i see no live annotation no my youtube when im live on twitch..

StianNorway

can u guys plz fix this , its not working.. no annotations on my youtube videos.. everything is setup correctly

I’ve connected my twitch account to my YouTube account. But it wasn’t
working right cause I had twitch adnotation on every YouTube video on my
channel even when I was not streaming anything. I turned it off in
twitch settings but i still have that adnotations all the time. I don’t
know what to do. Please help me. I don’t want to have twitch link at the
begining of my every YouTube video…

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